


the nonexistent (is whatever we have not sufficiently desired)

by mythpoetry



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abigail is probably also the literal ghost in the machine, Abigail is the proverbial ghost in the machine, Magical Realism, metafiction of sorts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-27 09:07:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5042356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mythpoetry/pseuds/mythpoetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abigail is trapped in her narrative. She finds a new one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the nonexistent (is whatever we have not sufficiently desired)

He raised the knife to her neck and slit her throat.

 

                                                                                         ***

He raised the knife to her neck and slit her throat. In perpetuem. She saw the blood gather on the floor over and over again, felt the cold metal against her neck. A teacup broken, broken, ad infinitum. Ad nauseum. If everything that can happen will happen, then all of our choices are right ones. There is freedom in this; the kind of freedom that grabs hold of you and never lets you go, not even when you beg.

Abigail doesn't beg.

                                                                                         ***

When she visits Will in the hospital, he looks too pleased to see her. Too hopeful, too desperate; every stitch of despair etched out, torn to shreds. She feels like another stray dog, under his eager and impervious gaze. She doesn’t incline her head.

_It was surgical,_ she tells him, and she isn’t lying. There is truth curled up under her words, like moss under the hooves of deer. Abigail wants him to sniff the truth out of her. Tear it from her gut, if necessary. She has enough to spare - she is sick of fairytales and half-truths suspended in darkness. She makes her home in them nonetheless. Squares her shoulders comfortably and drinks in deeply of her penumbral breath, a great sound of rushing air that stirs no leaves and ripples no water. Feels her _lack._ Doesn’t say, _I am as real as you are._ Doesn’t say, _You know that there was no way out._

It may have been kinder to just rip the scales from eyes, the way he’s looking at her. To show him her great gouts of blood; bare her neck, in pity. But none of her fathers ever taught her to be kind.

 

                                                                                         ***

_This is a boat?_ she asks.

“It’s half a boat,” Will says. “It’ll be a full boat soon enough.” He connects some thing to another thing and makes inarticulate noises under his breath. Abigail’s never had much interest in putting things together when it’s so much more compelling to take them apart, but this looks especially boring to her non-boat-expert eyes.

_You’re going to take a boat you built,_ Abigail says, _across the ocean. To Europe._

Will has the decency to laugh, a hitched thing, like she startled it out of him. “Yeah,” he says, and runs his hand through his messy hair. He’s streaked in motor oil and he stinks to high heaven. She loves him a little bit, right now.

_What’s wrong with a plane?_ she asks, and immediately wishes she hadn’t. The last time she and Will boarded a plane together, she didn’t come back with him. She doesn’t want him to remember that. Not when she could so easily disappear in one fragile moment to the next. Not before she’s finished with what she has to do.

“I think I’m on a few no-fly lists,” Will says. He peers at her with barely concealed humour. “You probably are too.” The _young lady_ is implied. Abigail grins at that. She’s always liked the idea of being feared.

He doesn’t say, _Anyway, I think he’d like it,_ but she hears it nonetheless, in all his dark and hollow places.

_Seems a little melodramatic,_ is all she says, and Will smiles at her, again. That’s enough.

 

                                                                                         ***

The stars above her, scarring the endless black. Bright, sharp creatures, endlessly distant. Endlessly cold.

_That’s Atropos,_ Abigail says, and feels rather than sees Will’s smile in the dark, his head beside her. _See her shears?_

“To the left, yeah? Good eye.”

The boat rocks gently. Her back hurts from lying down so long, head craned up at the night sky but it’s worth it, just for the pain. To feel again, something that isn’t mist and hidden forests and half-seen images fading into dusk. The eternity of sky above and water beneath her had itched under her skin, and she’d paced the deck of Will’s weird sailboat, antsy, irritated, until he suggested that if the stars annoyed her so much, she should make her own constellations. Now they swam before her eyes. Shifting their spaces according to her whims.

“What about that one?”

_Macha,_ Abigail says. _Her belly._ She stares into the dark, the sound of water lapping at the boat. The wood hard and unyielding under her hands.

She wonders, sometimes, if she ever escaped that kitchen. No - she doesn’t wonder, not really, only pretends to because the reality is more unpleasant: she knows she is still _in_ there, will always be in there, somewhere between dead and not, somewhere between defined and not, in half-realized images and barely remembered phrases and sounds that remind her too much of an injured or trapped animal. She is not infinitely mutable. She is only half-grown.

_If they caught us now,_ she says, _it wouldn’t matter. Right? They couldn’t take us away._

“We’re not anywhere,” Will says in the dark beside her. “We’re nowhere. Nobody owns the sea or sky. There’s nothing they could do.”

_There’s always something they could do,_ she says.

His hand tentatively on her, fragile, cupping her the ball of her shoulder until she relaxes into the touch. “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he says. Swallows. “Anymore.”

_You aren’t responsible for me. You are only responsible for things that you own._ Abigail places her hand over Will’s, gently. _Hannibal is responsible for you,_ she says quietly.

His breath hitches. “Yeah,” he says. His voice breaks, but his hand under hers is steady as the tide.

 

                                                                                       ***

Something in the water, dark. Something black unfurling, undulating like an intelligent oil spill, delighting in its destruction, backed by moonlight. Abigail sees a wreckage of faces; Will’s, Hannibal’s. She doesn’t see her own. Her reflection is a ghost.

She remembers this moment. Her memory seems a thing of crushing inevitability, working backwards and forwards, accosting her with images that seem senseless until they don’t, until they’re completed, until Will loses what little grip on himself he has left and goes after his Creator too late, too early, with a knife or a gun or nothing but the hard curve of his body like a rubberband around a willow branch, until Hannibal consumes him piece by piece and too late realizes he will never be sated. Too many outcomes; too many rivers forking. It all ends the same way. It all _ends._ They will not survive each other without adaption, without _change_. She remembers this moment because she remembers everything.

It was very easy to slip out of restraints, she had realized long ago, once you became aware that they weren’t real. It was like climbing over a wall when no one was looking. And no one is ever, ever looking. No one ever _saw._ What was entropy but another restraint? She exists only on a periphery, the invisible line between light and dark, between night and dawn. She exists only in the twilight corpus callosum of her father, and God. She wonders who is who.

“I have a plan,” Will had said, and Abigail believed him, because the alternative was a chasm of hollow bones. Like a bird. She sees the outcome of his plan, scries it in the water beneath them. She says nothing.

 

                                                                                        ***

Italy is _grand._ It smothers her in religion. So many years loved by the Church, so different from her home country, with its foundations of austerity and literalism. She can see what Hannibal sees in this place, with his love of beauty and the macabre. She can imagine him in this chapel during Mass, profaning the Eucharist, consuming God.

_We are images of God,_ she imagines Hannibal might say, _because we eat him._ His presence is more real than the lack of him. A solid weight in the air around them.

Will feels it, too, she’s sure. There’s something in his easy strides, in his comfortable movements. He’s sure of himself. He fits into his own skin well, now. Hannibal has tailored him perfectly.

The priest catches her eye as she passes him, gives her a look of knowingness. Of _seeing._ She wonders how she looks through his eyes. A girl? A ghost? Something else, trapped in the dark and narrow confines of his view? Another animal up a chimney; just more prey. No, that isn’t it. Something else. If she thinks long enough she will know – reach out with arborescent tendrils, sharp at the ends. Knowledge bursting like fruit. But she moves away. It doesn’t matter. She must conserve her strength for what does. Will stands a bit ahead of her, like a sculpture.

_I feel like I’m fading,_ she says to him. It’s an experiment, of sorts. She wants to lead him gently to their conclusion, show him comfort and care along the way. But he’s always been stubborn. If she has to gut him, she will.

He looks at her with his lost-dog face, the kind he wears when he’s too tired or too distressed to cloak himself in a veneer of normalcy. It makes him look naked.

“I feel like I’m fading,” he repeats, then takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. How many times will they tread this path? How many times will he disappear, only to be rebuilt in Hannibal’s image?

Wherever they lead, she cannot follow. Wherever they fall, she must not go. She can hear the water rushing around them; she cannot bear the dark and cold of the sea once more. There will be no more boat. There will be no more safe places.

_We don’t choose who we love,_ she tells him. _The choice is never ours._

“An accident,” Will says. “Like forgiveness.”

Abigail had loved her father. All of them. But now something in her twists, a piece of metal unfurling in her chest. She wonders how much of himself Will has left. If he was parceling it out piece by piece; a bouquet of blooming organs.

_An accident_ , she says. _No._ She reaches out for Will. He takes her hand like he’s drowning. His eyes are so like hers.

_Hannibal sparing you,_ she says, _wasn’t an accident._

“I know,” Will says. “I know, I know.”

Above them, God looks down. Below them, the devil listens. In delight or judgment, she doesn’t know.

 

                                                                                      ***

At some point the narratives we lay our lives in must converge, the way all rivers have a delta, the way blood does not run forever. Abigail’s throat had long been dry. And she has no desire to drown.

Hannibal was not God, not of her, never was, never will be. Hannibal could not stop her unearthing or escaping or telling truths couched in shadows. He could not reach down inside her and undo her. Not even now.

Will Graham was not her father, not anymore. She had gripped him tight and then freed him gladly. His story was warped like wood sunk in water, and he wanted it that way. She doesn’t blame him. Love is always a compromise of self.

She can’t stay. To stay means to further her existence in such a way that is not complete unto herself. It wouldn’t do. It hadn’t _done._ She was sick of scars. She was sick of fathers. She was sick of God, too, thinking he had a hand around her neck when, if there was one thing she had always been able to do, with precision, with anger, with careful calculation, with shaking vulnerability, with every tear and knife and delicately chosen word in her arsenal, it was _escape._

Abigail rose up and slew herself.

The knife was against her throat, a slice of air and color and light. Her blood gathered on the floor. She was not damaged; only changed. This time it would take. Death had become the ultimate act of self-preservation. An act instinctually hers, with no one else to stain its purity. Cast by her own hand into something else. A rebirth, of moths and birds and fawns. A thicket of thorns, green like growth, something new and sharp, with many teeth.


End file.
